Chapter 3: The European Project and European Higher Education

This chapter maps existing scholarship on the European project and European higher education initiatives, focusing primarily on the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This chapter also considers some key theoretical ideas around the notion of Europe and its related terms, informed by the discussion of neo-institutionalism in the previous chapter. While the borders of the European Union (EU) have been a matter of political agreements, the European project has been developing as a space of meaning, that has increasingly been surpassing the borders of the EU, and aiming to unite Europe as a region the geography of which spans beyond EU's borders (Kushnir, 2016). As such, in this book, the terms the European project and Europe are used interchangeably.

This section explores key debates around the borders of the European project, analyses it as a space of meaning and an ongoing balancing act between unity and diversity. Attention is also paid to its evolving mission. According to the logic of historical neo-institutionalism, explained in the previous chapter, this background information is a key historical context for scrutinising the relationship between the European project and the EHEA, available literature about which is reviewed at the end of this chapter.

Most of the perspectives on what Europe is concentrate on the idea of its borders. One example of this is the EU versus geographical Europe debate. The term Europe is very often used interchangeably with term the European Union (EU) (Bellier & Wilson, 2020; Novoa & Lawn, 2002; Papatsiba, 2009). There are even attempts in the earlier literature to emphasise the link between the two by capitalising the first two letters of the term ‘EUrope’ and its derivatives in order to make a connection to the spelling of the EU (Antonsich, 2008). This was the case even though geographically Europe extends further to the east from the EU border, covering some non-EU countries such as Moldova, Ukraine and even a small western part of Russia (Walters, 2009). However, more recent literature (e.g. Kočan, 2023, p. 15) points out flaws in such thinking and calls for distinguishing ‘Europeanisation from EU-isation’.

Scholars have been asking what the meaning of Europe is for a couple of decades (Datler et al., 2021; Meacham & de Warren, 2021; Olszewska, 2022) in the attempts to consolidate a uniform answer. This process suggests a degree of fluidity in the meaning of Europe as it is imagined. For this reason, Abélès (2020, p. 40) calls it a ‘virtual Europe’. Similarly, Lawn and Grek (2012) recognise that the idea of borders is an example of conventional thinking about Europe because people are used to applying their conception of country boundaries to speculate about Europe. Nevertheless, apart from the focus on the issue of borders that define Europe, the authors argue that Europe is ‘a space of meaning’ rather than ‘merely a place’ (Lawn & Grek, 2012, p. 13).

This book is informed by Lawn and Grek's (2012) notion of Europe as ‘a space of meaning’ rather than ‘merely a place’ and acknowledges that both of these statements are two separate, but related, ways of viewing Europe. Lawn and Grek's (2012) thinking is extended here to suggest that Europe is, indeed, a space of meaning but it should not be seen as an idea separate from the view that it is still a place with borders. Rather, it should be viewed as including borders, which are also instrumental in shaping the meaning of Europe. Given the focus of the book on the EHEA and its link to Europe, in this book, Europe is seen as a space that expands European borders beyond the EU.

This book is also informed by the argument in my earlier paper (Kushnir, 2016, p. 665) that EHEA's ‘Bologna Process contributes to defining Europe by changing its geopolitics through expanding its borders and promoting the idea of a common European identity within these borders.’ This book only partly relies on this argument due to some significant changes that took place since the 2016 study. These changes include the subsiding of the focus in the EHEA on cultivating European identity and placing an emphasis on internationalisation as well as advocating social justice (Kushnir et al., 2024).

Lawn and Grek (2012) explain that the view of Europe as ‘a space of meaning’ builds on another concept – the ‘imagined community’. This concept was introduced by Anderson in a broader context, not specifically Europe, with the intention of theorising nations and nationalism (Anderson, 1983, p. 15). Anderson stated that nations are imagined because while their members do not know one another, they all consider themselves to be part of one community. Nations are distinct because the ways in which they are imagined differ. As a result, nationalism is not about awakening a nation but about, in a way, inventing a nation. Lawn and Grek (2012) developed their notion of Europe as ‘a space of meaning’ based on these ideas, implying that the meaning of Europe depends on how and by whom it is imagined.

It is also important to emphasise the challenges with regard to generating a homogenous meaning of European-ness within Europe. Derrida (1992) warns that the European identity-seeking process is about building commonality with respect for unavoidable differences. Derrida acknowledges that the respect for diversity is the only route for commonality to be facilitated in Europe. Trying to establish one centralised authority would only undermine the respect for diversity which is an integral part of European identity. A more recent study (Sassatelli, 2021, p. 195) has also highlighted the ideas of ‘Europe's cosmopolitan identity’ and ‘unity in diversity’.

To unpack the essence of why unity and diversity in Europe that transcends the borders of the EU have to be balanced, let us review relevant issues that the EU itself has been facing. A lack of unity within the EU, as well as between the EU and its neighbours, has recently been noticeable with regard to a few challenges, such as in the disagreements about how to handle the post-2015 migrant crisis related to the arrival of refugees mainly from Syria. This ‘migrant crisis’ has uncovered a number of weaknesses in the EU, such as political divisions among the EU countries, the lack of the EU's preparedness to deal with such a crisis, a transparency deficit in the work of the EU institutions and questions around whether a common European identity existed at all (Taggart & Szczerbiak, 2018).

The biggest polemics concerned the Visegrad group (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia) and the United Kingdom. What concerns the former regions, their ‘drifting away’ from the rest of the EU has been evident mainly because of Visegrad countries' reluctance to accept refugees (Nagy, 2017, p. 2). Regarding the second region – the United Kingdom – its oppositional rhetoric to the EU was apparent long before the ‘migrant crisis’, such as in Fletcher's (2009, p. 71) analysis of the ‘balancing of the United Kingdom's “Ins” and “Outs”’ in the EU. This was a fertile ground for the migrant crisis to add fuel to the UK Leave Campaign as the 2016 Brexit Referendum was approaching (Sayer, 2017).

The ‘migrant crisis’ exposed another EU's weakness related to migration and refugee policy, specifically the gaps in the Common Asylum System (CAS), as well as with wider EU institutions. Despite some controversies over the CAS (Kugiel, 2016), the system had been working in the context of lower numbers before 2014 (Pastore & Henry, 2016). The inadequacy of CAS after 2015 had been part of a wider issue with the EU institutions. A perceived lack of transparency in the work of EU institutions predated the ‘migrant crisis’ (Follesdal & Hix, 2006). However, the sentiment was not as strong as afterwards.

The idea of a European identity started to be questioned more after the ‘migrant crisis’ as well (Clycq, 2021). In this context, it does not come as a surprise that Kushnir et al. (2020, p. 314) points out ‘a new central place for migration policy in debates on EU integration.’ Evidently, European politics started emphasising migration, but only in addition to education, the role of which has not decreased due to the work of the EHEA since 1998 and the European Education Area since 2017 (Kushnir, 2021). The work of the EHEA, in particular, which encompasses a lot more countries than the EU, points again to the idea of a growing reach of the European project explained earlier.

The mission of the European project has been an ongoing journey. A huge milestone in the consolidation of the peoples of Europe was the establishment of the EU. The main reason for its emergence was ensuring security on the continent and embarking on a peace-building mission. The fall of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia back in 1991 contributed to this aspiration (Dedman, 2009). The Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992 and ratified in 1993, established the EU initially with the membership of 12 countries. This consolidated the efforts to bring European people together. This also commenced a new phase in the evolution of the European project through a few important steps. They included launching the single market in 1993 and the European Economic Area in 1994 which, importantly, extended the single market beyond EU borders to include three members of the European Free Trade Association. Following this, border-free travel was enacted in 1995 by the Schengen Agreement. These developments were complemented and followed by working out how to reform EU institutions and facilitate European ‘citizenship’ in 1997 and launching the Euro in 1999. Several waves of EU enlargement followed to include neighbouring states in 1995, 2004, 2007 and 2013, ending up in the membership of 28 Member States (MSs) before Brexit (EU, 2024).

The EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 for its achievements in the peace-building (Bebler, 2015) – the journey it embarked on after the WWII. However, the time that these advancements took has gradually altered the sense of urgency and need for the post-war peace-building and security embodied in the development of the European project. Younger generations could not relate to those needs, and the bureaucratic procedures of the EU were not adding towards persuading them that the Union in such a form was a way forward (Polyakova, 2016). Moreover, new challenges such as dealing with forced migration came to be seen as a drawback of being in the Union (Taggart & Szczerbiak, 2018).

The search for the drivers of the European project continued. In this effort, European education emerged as such a uniting factor. Over a decade ago, Grek (2008, p. 208) argued that, ‘…education is slowly moving from the margins of European governance to the very centre of its policy making.’ I have also highlighted (Kushnir, 2021) a similar tendency in how the European Education Area, as a series of initiatives for all levels of education in the EU MSs, has been used by EU decision-makers to facilitate the deepening of the relationships among the EU MSs in the context of various challenges they have been dealing with. Specifically, HE has played a key role in developing the European project through the facilitation of academic mobility, aiding the creation of the European single market and a European citizen (Robertson et al., 2016). This central role that education has started holding in the EU has been important but it did not turn out to be as uniting as the peace-building ideal that led to the establishment of the EU.

The main aim of the development of post-war institutions in Europe was to make another war on the European continent unthinkable and impossible. Nevertheless, those establishments started prioritising elite governance over popular participation. Resultingly, a Europe founded on education has, arguably, started appearing as a more truly people's Europe than what the post-war institutions have brought about for us. Education has then emerged as an instrument for defeating the lack of unity within the EU, and even more so, for developing deeper relationships between the EU MSs, as well as between them and their neighbouring countries.

While the idea that HE has been instrumental to the development of the European project has been briefly mentioned, the below sheds more light on the relationship between European HE and the European project.

The process of HE Europeanisation can be traced back to the period after World War II, when between the 1950s and the 1990s:

After this and the active development and enactment of joint academic mobility programmes (Scott, 2012), HE in Europe was viewed by the European Commission (EC) as a potential tool to help create a European single market and European citizen (Corbett, 2005). The issue of the 1991 Memorandum on Higher Education demonstrates that HE ‘had already become part of the Community's broader agenda of economic and social coherence’ (Huisman & Van Der Wende, 2004, p. 350). Furthermore, the aim of creating a common identity had gained momentum in light of the challenges of Americanisation and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Grek, 2008). The necessity to reinforce the common identity of Europe led to signing the Treaty on European Union or the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and enforcing it in 1993. Ironically, despite the fact that the Maastricht had been eagerly anticipated, enthusiasm decreased after it was signed (Grek, 2008). Grek (2008) suggests that this lack of support could only have been overcome once a unifying myth was found. The idea of common economic policies seemed not to have been sufficient enough to justify the European project. Instead, education in general, including HE, started emerging as a more influential factor of Europeanisation in the region (Grek, 2008).

The EC devised new tactics to develop a ‘European dimension’ in education by further consolidating the European HE space and looking for cooperation opportunities with other regions (Robertson et al., 2016). A range of collaborative programmes were established with non-EU states, for example: the América Latina – Formación Académica (ALFA) programme in Latin America; the Trans-European Mobility Programme for University Studies (TEMPUS) programme with the Western Balkans, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and some Mediterranean countries; and Asia-Link with Asia (Robertson, 2008). While these were significant developments, they tended to be based on cultural cooperation and idea exchange, and ‘were not well coordinated with the emerging policy programme for education within Europe’ (Robertson et al., 2016, p. 29). Mounting global pressures prompted the EU to seek a more coordinated strategy of building its economic competitiveness in different ways, including through HE by setting out to develop the EHEA.

It is also important to note that the EHEA has not been the only platform that allowed European cooperation in HE. EC Directorate General for Education and Culture has coordinated a number of initiatives that collectively came to be known as the Education and Training (ET) Work frameworks 2010/2020 which targeted mainly EU countries. Ionela and Camelia (2014, p. 330) state that both frameworks considered ‘the whole spectrum of education and training systems from the perspective of lifelong learning, covering all levels and contexts (including non-formal and informal education)’. This proves that HE has been one of their priorities. Aside from this, there has been some overlap between EHEA's Bologna Process and ET 2010/2020. Ferreira and Mota (2019, p. 182) explain that ‘The education and training programmes include the initiatives in the context of the inter-governmental platform for the Bologna Process’. While these ET frameworks did not represent a formalised EU education space, they paved way for it, which culminated in 2017 with the establishment of the European Education Area (EEA).

The EEA is an education policy harmonisation project specifically for the EU MSs (EC, 2020). Unlike the EHEA, the EEA is exclusively for the EU. The website of the EC (EC, 2020) details that the EEA is an EU project to enable ‘all young people to benefit from the best education and training, and to find employment across Europe’. Moreover, unlike the EHEA, this is meant to be achieved through a range of initiatives across all levels and types of education: mutual recognition of diplomas, quality in early childhood education and care, language learning, key competencies for lifelong learning, digital education action plans, common values, European universities initiative and European student card initiative. The European universities initiatives have, arguably, gained the most momentum recently. However, similarly to ET 2010/2020, it has come to been associated with the EHEA as well (Moscovitz & Zahavi, 2020).

Scott (2012, p. 4) states that the ‘action lines’ that emerged in the EHEA were always negotiated in terms of a ‘delicate balance between Europe-wide initiatives and the prerogatives of nation states.’ The active development and enactment of joint academic mobility programmes, mentioned above, were underway even before the formal establishment of the EU through the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. For example, the Erasmus and TEMPUS programmes played a part in paving the way towards building the EHEA. Almost a decade of success of the Erasmus programme, which supported student mobility, contributed to forming the basis of the EHEA (Powell & Finger, 2013). The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) was originally introduced in the Erasmus programme's framework to support student mobility through credit transfer (Weiss & Egea-Cortines, 2008). A decade later, it was taken up in the Bologna Process to be used as one of its action lines. A similar contribution was made by the TEMPUS programme, which was established in 1990 by the EC. TEMPUS aimed to promote and support the modernisation of HE in Western and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean region, mainly through university cooperation projects and individual mobility grants (Keeling, 2006).

Moreover, the diploma supplement was established by the Lisbon Recognition Convention in 1997 – a year before the first pre-Bologna international ministerial conference in 1998 – as a final transcript of grades and credits that students had to obtain after their studies. It became a Bologna action line from the onset of the Bologna Process with the aim to promote the recognition of degrees, as well as the mobility and employability of graduates (Vögtle, 2014).

These pre-Bologna developments created a foundation for the construction of the EHEA by establishing easily readable, comparable and recognisable degrees through a range of action lines. That said, the list of action lines presented by different scholars vary. This is not surprising – action lines are negotiated at biennial international ministerial conferences (EHEA, 2024) and are expanded and regrouped in international ministerial documents. As such, the Bologna Process, and therefore the EHEA, are often thought of as moving targets, as new elements are consistently added (Diogo, 2020; Teichler, 2012). Another perspective views the Bologna Process as a ‘snowball’ in the EHEA, as it attaches previous European HE developments to itself as it develops its action lines (Reichert, 2010; Scott, 2012; Vögtle & Martens, 2014). Such a combination of different HE aims in the EHEA prompted Veiga (2012, p. 389) to pose the following question: ‘Could it be that the shift in policy discourse extended the scale of Bologna, thereby making it difficult to delineate clearly what in effect Bologna policy was(is) and what it was(is) not?’

The Bologna Process within the EHEA is also difficult to delineate because it crossed EU boarders to encompass the geographical Europe and some countries beyond it that are not commonly seen as European (e.g. Kazakhstan). This territorial expansion has called into question the meaning of the European in the European HE space. In this context, the term European does not mean the EU or its HE space. Nevertheless, the EHEA was the first and biggest formal all-encompassing HE space that involved EU countries and many of their neighbours, and transformed into an ‘international higher education regime’ (Zahavi & Friedman, 2019, p. 23).

There are three major interrelated gaps in the literation that sits on the intersection of the topics related to the European project and European HE. These gaps are related to the role of European HE represented by the EHEA initiatives in understanding the evolving mission of the European project in the post-2020 era, focusing on the early 2020s.

First and foremost, the four founders of the EHEA, particularly the interconnectedness of their EHEA membership agendas and their wider political agendas is a gap in existing research. This book relies on the insights of the representatives from key EHEA stakeholders in EHEA's four founding countries: Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. There is a range of single-country or collective case studies that incorporated only some countries of my interest in the context of the EHEA. Most of the earlier studies focus on the implementation implications of the Bologna action lines and the process of relevant reforms (e.g. Antoniolli, 2006; Field, 2005; Guth, 2006; Malan, 2004). The foci of recent studies (Kushnir, 2023; Kushnir & Yazgan, 2023; Marquand & Scott, 2018) are more varied. For example, Marquand and Scott (2018) explain the difference of enthusiasm for the EHEA action lines in UK devolved governments. No other study places EHEA's founders jointly at the centre of attention. An exception is my recent article (Kushnir & Yazgan, 2023) which is informed by this same project and represents its extract. Part of the significance of this book lies in addressing this particular gap by exploring the interconnectedness of their EHEA membership agendas and their wider political agendas.

Second, prior scholarship on the link between the European project and the EHEA has not relied on neo-institutionalism in the analysis of Europeanisation politics in the context of EHEA memberships, which has scope to offer innovative perspectives, as illustrated by the upcoming chapters. Such an analysis from the neo-institutionalist lens is timely for theorising differentiated Europeanisation from the HE perspective and informing EHEA international level policy-making in the run-up to EHEA's new deadline of 2030 (EHEA, 2024). The first years after the 19 November, 2020, stocktaking ministerial meeting are crucial in shaping the directions of work of EHEA's signatories. Although the concept ‘differentiated Europeanisation’ stems from EU studies, it has also been applied to the analysis of the EHEA, the boundaries of which spread far beyond the EU. Two publications have applied it. Veiga et al. (2015) applied it, but only in the area of HE harmonisation and only in the context of Germany, Italy, Norway and Portugal. Even though Germany and Italy featured in that study, it did not answer the questions posed by the project reported in this book. This is because the scholars relied only on the analysis of country's Bologna reports prior to 2009, did not review the situation post-2020, did not offer an in-depth exploration of the perspectives of key HE actors on the EHEA membership and did not view it as a case of a wider Europeanisation agenda of the countries. Veiga's (2023) reflective article juxtaposes the discussion of differentiated integration in the EU and differences within the EHEA. However, while discussing Brexit, Veiga (2023) does not focus specifically on the timeframe after the 2020 EHEA's deadline and the war context in Ukraine. The scholar also does not focus on four EHEA's founders and does not inform their analysis by neo-institutionalism. It is essential to bridge the literature on the EHEA and wider Europeanisation particularly with regard to the countries that initiated the EHEA as a platform for Europeanisation to better understand the nature of Europeanisation.

Third and finally, the study reported in this book also addresses a temporal-contextual gap in the available field of research on the EHEA by covering the recent period post-2020. The state of affairs post-2020 is of a special interest here because in addition to the change of European geopolitics in 2020 following the end of the Brexit transitional period, 2020 was the deadline for the achievement of a ‘fully-functioning EHEA’ (EHEA, 2024) and planning further work, as well as following the launch of a full-scale war against Ukraine by Russia, which is a significant political phenomenon in Europe. This first collective case study makes an essential contribution to the scholarship about the EHEA by advancing our limited knowledge about its initiators and Europeanisation in the early 2020s.

This chapter has mapped the landscape of existing research into the European project and the EHEA. This literature review has explored key debates around the borders of the European project, analysed Europe as a space of meaning, the balance between unity and diversity in it and its evolving mission. The literature review above has also delved into the relationship between the European project and the EHEA, highlighting how the EHEA has been built and what is known to date about its role in crafting the European project. This chapter has also pointed out a few major gaps in the reviewed scholarship. These overlapping gaps are related to the role of European HE represented by EHEA initiatives in understanding the evolving mission of the European project in the early 2020s era.